I have a confession to make. I vibe coded!

If you are a GitHub user, you will encounter the one-month trial for Copilot (the one for coding, not the one for work or whatever Microsoft wants to call Copilot nowadays) at some point. As a Mastodon admin, I always had the idea of creating an app for moderation or approving or rejecting accounts on the instance. So I thought, “why not give it a try?” The documentation for Mastodon was there, and one month was a good timebox.

I must admit that the setup was rather simple. I created an Xcode project for iOS 26 and pushed it into a private repo. Then I created issues with user stories or bug reports and assigned them to Copilot. Every time the AI (Claude 4.5) created a PR for new features or bug fixes, I checked it locally with the iPhone Simulator. If everything looked OK, I merged the PR into the main branch and continued with the next issue.

The app focuses on the core moderation tasks that matter day to day: reviewing reports, taking action on accounts, and keeping an eye on instance activity and statistics.

The Problems

So iOS developers and designers are not needed anymore? Well, no…

I had the feeling that, after some time, a real human developer would invest some time into refactoring the code. I assigned a refactor issue to Copilot, and it found a huge ton of unused code and happily threw nearly every implemented feature out of the project (because less code is better, right?). At this point, I had a bit of a friendly argument with it, and it restored the features.

It also found some undocumented code in the Mastodon codebase and implemented some features that can’t be used without risk. So I put them behind an “Experimental” toggle. These features were, for example, moderation of tags and statuses.

As you may see (I don’t want to share the full screenshots because real data is used), the app looks without any doubt like an iOS app. Copilot always developed with the Apple HIG in mind, but if you ask me, there are a lot of problems. Components are not always in a clear hierarchy, and things are weirdly grouped. Consistency is not always given, and a look into the codebase reveals that it has no idea of what materials are.

Conclusion

So, can Copilot replace an iOS developer or designer? Not quite. It’s amazing at generating code fast and following general guidelines.

I had fun writing the issues, testing the features on my phone, and writing new issues on the fly. When I came home, new PRs were waiting to be tested. But it’s not a replacement, and sometimes you have to argue with it to keep your app intact. 😅